The New Yorker: This mania is what Marvel followers have hungered for, and it would be fruitless to deny their delight. As Loki says to a crowd of earthlings, ‘It is the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation.’...
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In the fall of 1994 at Oberlin College, I started the first chapter of Students for a Free Tibet. I had previously interned at the Internation Campaign for Tibet, and I went on to intern at Milerapa (the foundation Yauch...
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Over the past year, through 8 alpha and 15 beta releases, ThinkUp has evolved into a rich platform that captures and analyzes data from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. All this time, the developer community has been more focused on ThinkUp's internal engine than its user-facing look and feel. ThinkUp's current design, generously created by Bill F. at Dash30 in his free time, came together in a piecemeal fashion, bit by bit, as new functionality emerged. So far, we haven't taken a comprehensive, user-focused approach to designing ThinkUp's application interface and design. That's about to change. For the past 7 months,...
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I had an idea a couple weeks ago and so I tweeted about it: Nobody took up the challenge. So after finding a couple hours of my own, and wanting to get better with Backbone.js, I made it. (Wrote mostly...
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I'm leading a panel discussion at an event in a few weeks, and I was asked if I would need anything above and beyond the usual (projector, mics, etc.). And since I'm regularly asked to lead panel discussions, I thought...
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Did you get a visit from the Google Feature Fairy yesterday? I did, and some lovely new colors appeared in the top navigation bar. I saw some changes on the Grand Ol’ Search Engine page, too. Then, a curious little...
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One of the things about having such a small team yet and trying to be as responsive as possible to users is that sometimes we have to push neat features and projects aside to take care of some important issues. This weekend and last week a couple came to light...
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Though it was initially called a mansion, Osama Bin Laden’s safe house décor might better be described as Meth Lab Chic. (Not that I’m all that familiar with meth lab interiors, natch.) Rather than a set from 24, it's more the kind of place only Vibe magazine would choose for a shoot, no pun intended. His particleboard furniture looks like it was salvaged from a rural roadside free pile; a power strip is bolted arbitrarily to the wall; wires are strung higgledy-piggledy as if by an adolescent hobbyist; and this former heir to a multimillion Saudi fortune gets relegated to watching standard def video on a TV you couldn’t get $5 for on Craigslist. It seems only a matter of time before we’re told they found porn on his computer. All kidding aside: Our mythologies about the superpowerful and insanely devious OBL stem from the trauma of the 9/11 attacks....
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Expert Labs had five glorious days working together in New York City and Washington, DC last week. We met with agencies, defined our roadmap for the coming months, and took a couple of fun field trips, too. Incredibly, it was the first time the four of us worked together in the same physical room. On Monday, Andy and I got to collaboratively hack on ThinkUp at Tipping Point Partners in lower Manhattan. Working at the same table makes it easy to get things done: that afternoon, Andy put the final touches on ThinkBack, the first visualization which uses ThinkUp's new...
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For a long time I've been trying to use the good stuff, trying to enjoy the nice things I have rather than save them for some far off "better" time when they'd be appropriate. I learned this lesson the hard...
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I remember telling my mother that I had a "corazonada" (a hunch) that the baby would come early. She was happy to hear this, and I was so sure that my instincts were on target that I started to wrap...
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Top tens are so over. Here are my top 9 favorite tracks from 2010. The first two I have to put on there because I'm a white guy over the age of 40. Two songs about telephones, both of which...
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The last thing I would imagine the world would need is a *new* blog app, but [Anil suggested just that][personalcomment] in response to my post on building a journal mesh: > I think the best thing that could happen right now to encourage long-form sharing, though, would be having tools...
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You know what I love about blogging? That I can toss off a quick kneejerk post about the new Google Latitude iPhone app, and get a thoughtful and well-reasoned response from Ken Norton, the product manager of Google Latitude. (It...
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Unless you've been living on another planet, you know that we have endured an orgy of motherphilia for at least the last two decades. Movie stars proudly display their baby bumps, and the shiny magazines at the checkout counter never...
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One of my most vivid childhood memories is being lucky enough to go down on the field for batting practice at Wrigley before an afternoon Cubs / Reds game. Everything was larger than life -- the field, the stadium, the...
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During my time at Airside I’ve pitched a great number of ideas to many different clients, but as with all pitching, some of the ideas that you’re just convinced will go through inevitably fall by the wayside. Most of the...
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